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The survey course: back to the drawing board (again)

I’ve written twice before about approaches to the survey course in medieval Iberian literature (or whatever you prefer to call it). The first time (Sep 2011), I took an ‘issues-based’ approach by which I applied a ‘big idea’ to whatever text I was teaching. I used mainly handouts of texts I had entered and glossed for my undergrad students, sometimes following the lead of popular anthologies and providing study questions, key concepts, a very minor apparatus. I was responding to student feedback (based on their written comments and their affect and my perceived level of their engagement during class) that suggested students will more readily engage a culturally unfamiliar text when it is paired with a cultural problem with which they are familiar. It’s a bit of conditioning: you pair a negative stimulus with an associated positive one, in order to transfer the positive attachment to the less attractive object. Your students might call it ‘relatability.’

This approach was a success in terms of leveraging interest in broader cultural problems (female beauty standard, sexual politics, ethical economies such as carbon credits, and so on). However, two problems persisted: I found it difficult to achieve a thematic or narrative cohesion for the course, something that the students pointed out in their written comments. Also, the teaching materials, a course reader made up of my own short pedagogical editions and photocopies of excerpts from modern editions, was hard to work with. It lacked consistent pagination, was not illustrated, and had no visual or thematic identity as a text.

Classic

In frustration, I reverted to the classic anthology (which I wrote about here in July 2013), a format with which I was familiar but with which I had serious reservations. I decided, for convenience’s sake, to go with the textbook. There were advantages: I used the reading comprehension questions for the daily online quizzes, and the thematic questions for exam questions. There was perfect clarity as to what was being assessed. I fielded very few procedural questions from students.

After teaching this format for a year, I was pleased with the clear-cut structure of the assessments, but still kept running up against the narrative problem. For students (and myself to a lesser degree), the History of Spanish Literature was not a meaningful rubric for organizing our readings. They are attracted to political and social narratives. More than anything else, they crave background information about the places and times in question. They find the original medieval Castilian difficult, disorienting, disheartening, but not distasteful.

Drawn to narrativeSource: Telegraph UK

In an attempt to address these concerns and to allow myself to return to teaching a more culturally inclusive vision of my understanding of the literary culture in the Peninsula during the first half of the second millennium, I decided to teach fewer works in their entirety, to give the students all texts in both Spanish and English (regardless of their original language of composition), and to assign trade books in English paired with each primary reading to give them abundant background information along with the narrative they seem to be craving. I was inspired by the example of my colleague Prof. S.J. Pearce (NYU), who has taught a similar course in English (focused on al-Andalus), and by a discussion I had with the Historian Prof. Brian Catlos (U Colorado) about organizing large survey courses. The result is the following course, organized thematically around questions of coexistence, conflict, and conquest. You can read a draft of the full syllabus here.

The idea with this approach is that the students come to the first day of class having read Menocal’s Ornament of the World and having viewed Cities of Light, and so have some historical and cultural background before getting down to the business of reading medieval texts. Each primary text is (ie paired with a historical study in English that gives them considerably more historical, political, and cultural background than the brief introductory paragraphs in a classic anthology, and the availability of English translations take the pressure off them to digest 13th- or 14th- century Castilian after just having come from third-year reading and composition courses.

It’s a new world

In the fall, when I teach the survey course in a larger format (60-70 students, 2 lectures and one discussion section), it will include the New World. Our department has shifted to a survey system that covers the Hispanic-Latino world during a given time period, as opposed to teaching separate sequences in Peninsular and Latin American literature. I will probably add the Diario of Columbus and Naufragios by Cabeza de Vaca, either in a bilingual edition (Columbus) or separate Spanish and English editions (Cabeza de Vaca).

And by the way, I am still looking for an undergrad-friendly secondary source in English to provide historical and cultural background for the romances fronterizos. Any suggestions?

8 thoughts on “The survey course: back to the drawing board (again)”

professor, it is great to see how much you work you put into these courses you create, it shows a lot of passion, which is fantastic, I remember when I took your course, I most enjoyed the works from yehudah halevi, he’s always worth having a look at. I think using a spanish explorer like cabeza de vaca is a brilliant way to transition from Iberian to new world literature. Regarding background information for romances fronterizos I think its always nice to explore spanish cuisine and the great moorish influence one can find in it on the southern side of the peninsula. Great work as always!

Into my second year of retirement, I continue to fantasize about how the ideal undergraduate literary survey course would go were I to be at the seminar table again. I share your ongoing concern that coherence in such courses eludes students, and I wonder about the value of an approach I attempted (and continue to dream about perfecting) in an effort to address this concern. Basically, it’s a philological solution, or, if you want to give it a historically neutral label, a lexical cluster approach. The givens in the approach are/were that the text is narrative, in my case, medieval and early modern French and Italian texts, its narrating voice speaks from sensory experience, and the sites of these experiences are/were body parts. So, for example, in “Les Lais” of Marie de France, we dealt with tactile experiences producing pleasure or pain in hands, arms and bird wings. Advantages for the professor were that readers spontaneously applied the universal capacity for sensory experience, not abstract thought, to deriving narrative sense, analysis had to be worked out in seminar format, and, miracle of miracles, readers allegorized corporality as the “body of a text,” producing unity and coherence where I least expected it. Any thoughts?

Wow, that is an incredibly subtle device, I’m not surprised it worked. Unfortunately this class is not taught around a seminar table, but in a small lecture hall to 60-70 kids, which presents different pedagogical challenges, as I am sure you know….

I would have less historical background, and more “primary” material. Paloma Mas Diaz, “Romancero” (Barcelona: Critica) has an excellent selection of 20th cenury Sephardic ballads, and includes a CD, which delighted my students. (a much more extensive anthology than Smith’s). Also “Antologia de Alfonso el Sabio”, ed. A.G. Solalinde (Austral), includes a relevant section from “Siete partidas”, ‘De los judios, which shows that there was less “convivencia” than A. Castro hypothesized .How about the “mora” episodes in LBA? Some poetry from Anton de Montoro, who felt the weight of anti-Judaic invective. Not to mention the horrendously prejudicial “Milagro” by Berceo, “El nino judio.”.

As a colophon, perhaps an excerpt from Angel Pulido,” Espanoles sin patria” (1905), a treatise which alerted modern Spain to the existence of the Sephardic diaspora, and stimulated ballad research by Menendez Pidal.

Steven thanks for your comments. It never occurred to me to use Pulido in this context. Great idea! As for Partida ‘De los judíos,’ don’t we usually understand the proscriptions as evidence of royal pushback *against* popular convivencia?

Great post, nice way to argue in favor of surveys, and with a wonderful selection. I will borrow some of your choices for texts.
A couple of things. There is a new Penguin translation, Song of the Cid (Raffael translation), Spanish txt, and an introduction by Menocal. I have used it recently and liked it. My students responded favorably too.
I have also used portions of Arts of Intimacy as additional support for Cities of Light. The book also has some nice features: images, selection of text, translation/ original items. It is a bit pricey.
Finally for your transatlantic side: Add de las Casas selections. It offers wonderful narratives, perceptions. Students really are shocked by the atrocities. And I discovered it connects nicely with the PMC, the crónicas.
Enjoy